Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Madero, Marta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081224186X ISBN 13: 9780812241860

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

To whom does a painted tablet—a tabula picta—belong? To the owner of the physical piece of wood on which an image is painted? Or to the person who made the painting on that piece of wood? By extension, one might ask, who is the owner of a text? Is it the person who has written the words, or the individual who possesses the piece of parchment or slab of stone on which those words are inscribed?

In Tabula Picta Marta Madero turns to the extensive glosses and commentaries that medieval jurists dedicated to the above questions when articulating a notion of intellectual and artistic property radically different from our own. The most important goal for these legal thinkers, Madero argues, was to situate things—whatever they might be—within a logical framework that would allow for their description, categorization, and placement within a proper hierarchical order. Only juridical reasoning, they claimed, was capable of sorting out the individual elements that nature or human art had brought together in a single unit; by establishing sets of distinctions and taxonomies worthy of Borges, legal discourse sought to demonstrate that behind the deceptive immediacy of things, lie the concepts and arguments of what one might call the artifices of the concrete.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marta Madero is Professor of Medieval History at Universidad Nacional de Gerneral Sarmiento in Argentina.

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Foreword, by Roger Chartier (translated by Jerome E. Singerman)
The Things and the Words

Subtle and erudite, Marta Madero's book is a contribution both to the history of the property rights to artistic works and to the history of ideas about material things. The corpus that she so meticulously analyzes is that of the glosses and commentaries that medieval jurists consecrated to the question of tabula picta, a notion inherited from Roman law and the terms of which are seemingly simple: To whom does a painted tablet belong? To the owner of the physical piece of wood on which an image is painted? Or to the person who made the painting on that piece of wood? By extension, the same question could be formulated in regard to writing and the parchment or any other surface on which words had been inscribed.

It is thus possible to read Madero's book in the first instance by placing it in the genealogical longue durée of the definition of intellectual property and its corollary, the construction of the figure or—to use Foucault's formulation—function of the author. Such a reading finds, in the writings of the medieval jurists, the first formulations of a distinction made in the eighteenth century and articulated with particular clarity by Kant between the book as "opus mechanicum," as an object belonging to whoever has acquired it, and the book as discourse addressed to the public and remaining the inalienable property of the author who has written it. In their way, the medieval glossators also address the possible conceptual separation between works, considered in their immaterial and continuing identity, and the multiple forms, whether simultaneous or serial, of their inscription and transmission. Such an understanding of the book will see in the medieval distinction between substantial essence and accidental forms the opposition, dear to practitioners of physical bibliography, between "substantives" and "accidentals" and will recognize, as well, in the primacy given to the painted work over the materiality of the surface on which it is painted something like the concept of the "immaterial thing" framed in the eighteenth century to designate the transcendence of aesthetic or intellectual creations over their material existence. Such a reading of Madero's book is entirely legitimate but may, nevertheless, be misleading.

For in fact, Madero's book introduces us to an intellectual world that is neither ours nor that of the eighteenth century, when the aesthetic and legal concepts that have defined our modern discourse first came together. The danger would be to subsume wrongly and unconsciously the reasoning of the medieval jurists into the categories we have come to accept. For the medievals, the purpose above all was to situate things—whatever they might be—within a logical framework that allowed them to be described, categorized, and placed in a proper hierarchical order. Physical evidence, shared experience, the direct perception of natural or artificial realities are inadequate to this task because they are incapable of deconstructing and placing in proper order the individual elements that nature or human art has brought together into a single unit. Only juridical reasoning, which proceeds by way of establishing distinctions, taxonomies, and hierarchies, is capable of transforming the things before our eyes into manipulable categories that enable us to determine their real identities, properties, and ownership.

Important consequences emerge from this, which oblige us to abandon our habitual way of thinking about things if we are to understand how the authors whom Madero studies actually thought. For them, the painted tablets or sheets of parchment covered with writing are objects that can be comprehended only when one places them in the context of natural phenomena or material productions that pose the same questions about the relation between the parts and the whole, about the modes of uniting elements, or about the hierarchy of the matrix to that which appears upon it. I will leave to the reader the pleasure of discovering both the many subtle distinctions between things factae and infactae, between accessio and specificatio or ferruminatio and adplombatio, as well as the multiplicity of opinions concerning the definition of these categories and the way they are handled in legal arguments. Madero's analytic virtuosity here is astounding, as she guides her reader through a universe of classificatory systems worthy of Borges. In truth, these address a hugely difficult task: that of articulating the essential reality to be decoded beneath visible appearances.

Madero thus takes the distinctions and categories of medieval law no less seriously than Yan Thomas did Roman law or Alain de Libera and Alain Boureau did Scholasticism; and her approach enables us to avoid two pitfalls. The first would be to connect too closely the thought about the things and legal procedural practice. The subjects of juridical argument are fully concrete, to be sure, as they concern financial transactions, the transfer of goods, and property disputes. But the construction of the categories that enabled the jurists to think about things is built upon a foundation of ancient and scholastic philosophy. It is governed neither by the urgency of the judgments nor by contractual relations between patrons and painters or copyists. The contractual matters that engage them take up none of the logic encountered in discussions of the tabula picta and focus, rather, on deadlines to be observed, payments to be made, and the details of the commission, such as the materials to be used, the iconography of the image, the typology of the writing. By focusing on the conceptual architecture of the glosses and commentaries rather than on the legal proceedings and decisions, Madero's approach runs counter to that by which historians, no doubt bored by the formalism of legal studies, have privileged actual judicial proceedings, legal practice, and the adjudication of disputes. She by no means intends to deny the importance of such studies, based as they are on the archival records of law courts. But her purpose here, as in her other published work in French and Spanish, is to recall that in every period—and quite spectacularly so in the Middle Ages—law consists first of all in the conceptual description of acts, things, and people and that it is only upon this abstract description that legal judgments can be based.

A second error would be to think that painting and writing were being considered by medieval jurists in aesthetic or intellectual terms. In the discussions concerning tabula picta, writing is always to be construed in its most material sense. It is inscription, ductus, and copy. It is never understood in the sense of literary composition even if the words écrire and écrivain have been used in French to describe authors as well as scribes since the fourteenth century. If the painting of wooden tablets has a different status, and one that implies the recognition of an original production, it is nevertheless not taken for a work of art. Its value is acknowledged according to the degree to which a rough material is transformed into a new object. The tabula picta as well as the written parchment belongs to the world of material objects, and not to that of aesthetic creation or symbolic representation.

The responses of the glossators to the question of the ownership of painted tablets or written objects varied from one school, period, or opinion to another, and Madero knowledgeably reconstructs the typology and chronology of these differences. She shows that however diverse they were, these responses were necessarily situated within a limited range of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 081224186X
• ISBN 13: 9780812241860
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande